2019 – The Year of the Blog

It’s been nearly five years since I’ve written anything on this blog, and quite a bit has changed.

When I last posted, I was working managing the IT department of a fairly large “hospitality” company. That’s fancy speak for “restaurants.” I’m not doing that anymore, in fact I’m not in IT at all.

Nope, I’m now a Senior Cyber Threat Analyst, which is fancy talk for “I read a lot of reports about hacker shit, and then help our customers not be hacked by that hacker shit.” When I say I read a lot of reports, I do mean I read a LOT of reports.

Hacker shit is far more in the public consciousness now than it was five years ago. Companies having their data sold on the Dark Web – it’s like the internet, but EVIL – is a common occurrence now. People are “doxed” regularly, which means all their personal information is found by weaponized asshats, and used to harass and drive their victims to suicide. Nation states are getting in on it big time, mostly China and Russia, but even Iran and the DPRK are doing their best, hacking the shit out of everyone, stealing company secrets and generally bringing warfare into the cyber age.

Hell, the 2016 election was heavily skewed by Russian Troll Farms acting under orders of the GRU.

Basically, we live in a dystopian cyberpunk novel.

Things aren’t all bad, of course. If they were, well, we’d all be dead. So, we’ve got that going for us.

VR is a thing now. More of a thing than it was, but not near as much a thing as we’d hoped. AI is way more of a thing, and personal listening devices that do, well, answer most anything you can ask and tie into various automation systems are cheap and common.

Oh, and Kingdom Hearts 3 comes out next month. That’s pretty dope.

Part of my new job, beyond all the reading, is report generation. I write a bunch of boring crap for work – I don’t think it’s boring, but we’ve gotta dry it up because customers. But it’s awoken the writer in me, and I figure I’m gonna need an outlet for all the snark I can’t fit into the work stuff, and I need to keep practicing my writing so I can get better at my job. Basically, a win/win situation.

Not that this is gonna become a Cyber Threat blog. Nope, but it is going to become what it’s always been – reviews and previews and thoughts and who knows what else. It’ll be where I work on projects before I spin them off into their own things.

I’ve got ideas too – a podcast dedicated to records (which have made one hell of a comeback!) and maybe, finally, get a Rex Parsec project off the ground. Any Rex Parsec project – I don’t care which.